TOM HOLMAN: Hi, everyone.
And thanks for tuning into Next OnAir.
Today, we'll be talking about G Suite's communications
products, in terms of both the latest updates that we've made
as well as what's ahead.
My name is Tom Holman, Senior Product Manager for Gmail.
And I'm joined by Dave Loxton, who's also
a Product Manager on G Suite.
Before we get into the specifics of our communications products,
I wanted to take a step back and acknowledge the sudden shift
that many of our businesses and employees
have recently faced in the workplace.
A lot of people, who for a really long time
relied on physical office space and infrastructure
to both communicate and collaborate,
have had to shift how they work and quickly.
The crisis at hand has become a massive catalyst
to remote, distributed, and flexible work.
And almost 3/4 of CFOs actually predict
that these changes will permanently
affect how companies choose to work moving forward.
While we're well into this new reality,
I want to quickly recap a few ways
we've adapted to try to make this change to flexible work
easier on people and organizations.
First, we made premium Meet features available
to all G Suite users, which meant
that every customer, from schools
to startups to small businesses to large enterprises,
could leverage larger meeting sizes, live streams,
recordings, and more.
We know that video meetings are a critical foundation
to remote collaboration.
And so this was a key first step.
But we took a second step as well.
We made our secure video meeting solution, Google Meet,
free to all.
There's no need to be a G Suite customer.
We wanted to make sure that everyone had easy access
to high quality, reliable video meetings
with full functionality.
This is still true today.
And anyone with a Google account can
use Google Meet just by going to meet.google.com
or finding it in Gmail.
And while we were making this overall solution free,
we also wanted to make it better.
As such, we pulled forward a few key features on our product
roadmap to land even earlier.
These included, first, adaptive layouts
or what you probably know affectionately as Brady Brunch
mode, where you can actually see your whole team on screen
at once.
Second, noise cancellation for whenever
your dog decides to bark during a meeting, or you
choose to click a pen.
And then finally, low-light mode, in case
you ever have to take a meeting from a closet, which I've
had to do on more than one occasion
with an 18-month-old running around.
Quick plug, if you want to hear more about what's
next on the roadmap for Google Meet,
you can check out our dedicated session, PC 112.
We have it linked below.
But you can also find it on the site for Next OnAir
by searching for future meetings.
Now while video meetings are critical,
we know that clearly they aren't the only way to communicate.
Rather depending on your message and the context,
at times chat and voice calling can actually
be the right medium.
We've also made important improvements to these products
as well.
On the chat side, we've introduced features
like guest access to make it easier
to collaborate with external partners and vendors, forward
inbox, to make it easier to follow up
on specific messages for those of you
who use your inbox as your to-do list,
the ability to edit messages, if you're
a little bit prone to typos like I am from time to time.
And finally, last month we made it easier
to migrate from Hangouts to Chat by doing several things,
including bringing all of Chat, both one-off
chats and persistent rooms into Gmail.
On the Voice front, we know that there are still
over 8 billion active phone numbers around the world.
And we want to make it easy to reach anyone, when connecting
over video just isn't possible.
So to make it easier to access both Voice and Chat,
last month we brought both of these products
directly into Gmail.
For organizations who use Google Voice as their Cloud telephony
solution, we now surface this functionality
on the right rail of Gmail.
Chat is also now available in Gmail in your left hand
nav, not just for one-on-one direct chats
but also for persistent group chats, which we call rooms.
Our goal here is make it as easy as possible for people
to access all of the things that they
need to communicate and to collaborate in one place.
Now while these were certainly critical improvements
to help people more effectively communicate in G Suite,
the key is that we've always had more in store.
We've always had more planned.
And the reason for this is that even before COVID-19,
work was demanding more and more from each of us
for a few different reasons.
First, there's just too much information
coming in via email, via chat, via meeting dial-in info,
documents and articles and tasks and more.
It's just too much.
Second, our work is increasingly spread across more apps
than ever before.
With the rise of best-in-class point SAAS solutions,
people are constantly checking more apps,
leading to more app switching and reduced ability to focus.
And then finally, we're working with more people than ever
before, both internally in our increasingly connected
organizations and externally with partners and vendors.
This naturally leads to still more communications
to keep track of, contributing to our first point here.
And that was just what we had to deal with before COVID-19.
But with COVID-19, we also have a few more complicating
factors.
First, more people have been working
from home, which means work itself
is more physically distributed than ever before,
increasing the challenges with communication
and collaboration.
And second, there's more life to manage.
People are having to juggle more personal responsibilities,
from childcare to elder care to other family commitments.
And not to mention the stress that
comes from the uncertainty of not knowing just quite what's
ahead.
Altogether, this is just too much.
It was too much before the pandemic.
And it's certainly too much now.
This actually ends up leading to a few distinct problems
in terms of how people actually spend their time.
First, we're switching tasks more than ever.
On average, people are only spending two minutes
on a given task or in a given tool.
That's nuts.
And it also means you've probably
actually already switched apps or checked another tool
since I began this talk.
Second, we're struggling more than ever before to find
what we need to do our job.
The reason for this is because things are so dispersed,
you're not actually really sure where that deck was shared
with you or when which tool your boss used
to give you an action item or an email or a comment in a doc.
Not having easy access to the things
we need to do our jobs naturally slows us down.
And finally, we're spending too much time on the small stuff,
on logistics, on things that take two minutes to do.
We're letting others set our priorities
with inbound communication, making
it hard to focus on the bigger things.
Now we all want to work on projects and parts of our job
that are the most impactful.
But today, it's ever--
it's harder than ever before to focus
on deep or high-impact work.
So with G Suite, this is really the problem
that we're trying to solve.
We want to create some sort of solution that's not yet
another tool for you to download or learn or onboard users to.
Rather, we want to find a way to make the tools that you already
use more helpful, to make it easier to access everything
that you need, to give you a better way
to manage the inbound flow of information,
with an added emphasis on features that help you better
prioritize and focus on the conversations
and on the tasks that truly matter.
With that in mind, I'm thrilled to introduce you
to your new home for work, an integrated workspace that
brings together Google Meet, Chat, Gmail, and more
to help teams stay seamlessly connected,
no matter where you're working from.
It integrates the core elements of work,
like voice and video calling, chat, email,
plus document collaboration and task management.
And the key is that this all comes together
in Gmail not another new application.
You can see what this looks like on mobile on this slide.
And this experience will also be part of Gmail on the web.
The goal is to help you better stay aligned of the top things
across your personal and group work,
to easily find what you need to get your job done.
But the new integrated Gmail doesn't
seek to just bring these things together.
Rather, it makes them better together.
And over the next several minutes,
Dave and I will walk through what this experience can
actually do.
So first things first, I want to emphasize
that Gmail will continue to offer
the same best-in-class class email
experience that over 1.5 billion people know and love
at its foundation.
The reason for this is that email still
plays an important role in lots of people's workdays.
Because it's universal.
It's professional.
And it's a medium that gives us more time and space
to be thoughtful.
Next, we've talked about how we've
integrated Chat into the Gmail web experience in the past.
And with this launch, we're actually
bringing that integration to mobile Gmail
for the first time.
Bringing chat and email together will make it easier
for you to access all the written communications that you
need in one place.
The chat tab that we're introducing here
is best for one-on-one or small group
chats that tend to be more off-the-cuff, impromptu,
or urgent conversations.
Beyond email and chat though, we've
also already discussed the importance
of video communications and of Google Meet for our customers.
We recently launched Meet in Gmail
across both desktop and mobile.
And with this launch, you'll still have easy access
to all of your scheduled and upcoming meetings
within the Gmail app.
I'm excited to also share that we're
extending Meet in Gmail to support direct calling right
from within the Gmail tab-- or within the Gmail
app, the Meet tab.
Because we all know that some things just
need to be talked out live.
The last major building block of this integrated workspace
is Rooms, which make it easier for groups
to collaborate on projects.
Now Rooms will have a group chat at their core.
But with this launch, we've also added experiences
for shared files and shared tasks.
Dave will go into more detail on these great new collaboration
features in just a minute.
Finally, I wanted to acknowledge that while these communication
offerings in video, chat, and email
represent the foundational elements of modern work,
we recognize that they don't encompass everything
that you need to do your job.
Rather, many people have a clear need
to use other best-in-class tools,
whether a CRM or an expense reporting tool.
Enter third-party integrations, Gmail
will support adding and accessing
your favorite third-party apps from within any kind
of conversation, across email, chat,
and rooms, which should help you to do more from one place
without having to go through the trouble of app
switching or losing context.
And now, I'll pass it off to Dave
to walk through how we're making all of these communication
channels better together.
DAVE LOXTON: Thanks, Tom.
So first and foremost, we know that work is fluid.
Sometimes an email needs a follow up conversation.
Or a chat needs a quick in-person sync to resolve.
Sometimes a message is a task that you
need to add to your to-do list.
We understand this fluidity.
And so one of the core principles
we used to design this new experience
was to make it easy to move seamlessly
between these different communication channels.
So you'll be able to start a room from an email.
You can jump on a call from a chat.
And you can turn a message into a task.
If you're running a few minutes late to a meeting,
you can easily ping the people you're
meeting with to let them know you'll be a bit late.
Everything's connected together in a way
that we hope makes it easy for you to manage the flow of work
and get more done.
Now, Tom showed you earlier that search
is a massive problem for people.
And you might know we have a bit of a reputation for search.
So it was important to us that we make it easier
for you to find what you're looking for from one place.
Right now, you can search across email or chat.
And we're actively working on making this crucial workflow
even better.
And rooms have a few new things, too.
We wanted to create a space where it's easy for groups
to come together and work on a project.
So there's a chat stream to help you communicate instantly
with your team.
Right alongside that, you'll have quick access
to important files you're working on.
And it's easy to create and assign tasks
so that you can track on a shared task list everything
that you need to do and everyone can see what needs to be done.
You got everything you need for a successful project in one
place.
And we're bringing document editing into rooms, too.
So you can discuss the document you're working on,
as you write it with your team.
You can also jump on a call at the same time
and see the person you're talking to,
alongside the work that you're doing together.
We wanted to make it easier to have
everything you need to do your job right in front of you.
And remember, it's not just about helping
you to access everything you need from one place
to reduce that friction of switching between apps.
And it's also really important that we
help you manage all that information that's
coming at you, so you can prioritize and focus
on what's most important.
On the prioritization front, we let you pin important rooms.
So they're always at the top and easy to get to.
We'll also be bringing the same nudges that you already know
and love from Gmail into chat.
Because we know it can be easy to miss things.
And we want to help make sure that you never drop a ball.
On the focus front, we've got some new tools to help
you protect your time, too.
So when you go out of office, your status
will be shown to everyone who tries to reach you.
So instead of trying to ping you on chat,
they might choose to email you instead.
We're also introducing do-not-disturb mode
for those times when you just want
to shut out all distractions and just get things done.
This will be visible to all your contacts as well,
so they know you're blocked off this time for yourself.
Now this is an area where we have plenty more planned
to help you feel less overwhelmed, so
make sure you look out for future announcements here.
And that's it for now.
We're so excited to get this product out to all of you
and hopefully help you better manage
the flow of your work in this next generation of Gmail.
If you're interested in trying it out, it's available now.
And you can go to this link to learn more.
We hope you enjoyed learning more about this,
the next generation of Gmail.
Thank you so much for tuning in.